Plum Rains

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  When she pushed into the hallway, Hiro backed up slowly, each robotic leg making springy sounds as he slowly pivoted. He bounced his body up and down with boyish pleasure. He was still blocking her way.

  “Sayoko-san?” she called out.

  The giddy charm left his voice. “Please?”

  “Sayoko-san?”

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  11 Angelica

  “Sayoko-san!” Angelica shouted into the condo, straining to hear a reply.

  “You dropped your shopping bag.” Hiro bent over to retrieve it, slow to hook his untrained fingers around the handles.

  “Get out of my way. Hiro. Please!”

  He stood up again, advancing toward her, his hands reaching out for her.

  “Why are you afraid?” His pitch had risen. He was fearful and confused, mirroring her behavior.

  “Move,” Angelica demanded.

  Gina’s red, hard-molded body came into view. She rolled across the living room floor, one step up from the entryway, holding a tray with a pot of tea and three cups. “Welcome!”

  “Sayoko-san!” Angelica shouted again. Why hadn’t she thought to check Gina’s cam in the last hour? She had been so distracted. So irresponsible.

  Hiro managed to spin around, infected by Angelica’s alarm, convinced as much as she was that an emergency was underway, shouting just as loudly. “Sayoko-san!”

  “Welcome,” Gina said, voice muted and pleasant. “Please come in.”

  There was a smell in the room: metallic, nutty, acrid. Something burning. How many hours had passed since she had last seen Sayoko—not just Gina bustling around the living room, via remote-cam, but Sayoko, living and breathing?

  “Please. Feel free to take off your shoes,” Gina said.

  Angelica stepped up from the polished floor of the hallway to the main living room, nursing shoes still on, tied tightly.

  “Please. Make use of our slippers,” Gina requested.

  Hiro was agitated and desperate for reassurance, like a dog with its head and tail down, whimpering. “Anji-san,” he called after her. He wasn’t calling her Anji-sensei now. He didn’t perceive her as his teacher at this moment. She was something else to him: possibly only an obstacle.

  Angelica tried her hardest to sound merely firm, loud, not terrified: “Sayoko-san. Obaasan. Where are you hiding?” With every step forward she scanned the room, expecting with a sudden strange calmness the terrible, inexplicable: a body on the floor, a slumped-over form in a chair, a leg sticking out from a doorway. She had found bodies before, of course, especially in the days before wearables and medtech alerts, and even after them, because alerts failed, computers failed, just like organs, muscles, circulatory systems. She had found bodies in beds. In one case, at a kitchen table, face calmly planted next to a cereal bowl. More often, on bathroom floors. Bathrooms were the most dangerous rooms in any house. But death can catch us anywhere. We fade like flowers. We crash like waves. We collapse, grow cold, harden. Things of the flesh.

  What had Hiro done?

  And it occurred to her now, only now: Yesterday. Her own error. She had missed giving Sayoko her early evening medications. She was used to timers going off on her phone—timers that had stopped working when her phone was hacked. But that was no excuse, blaming technology. Evening meds were a standard routine. She had been exhausted from her trip to Chiba, gleeful about the helper robot Gina, feeling proud and even whimsical, window shopping and daydreaming—distracted, criminally irresponsible.

  Worse, Hiro had tried to tell her. It was after dinner, when she was bringing Sayoko to the bathroom: something he had wanted to say:

  A small but important health observation.

  She had walked away and smugly shut the bathroom door to thwart him.

  I will log the observation for discussion later.

  How had she forgotten? Why hadn’t he insisted?

  One batch of medications entirely missed, eight prescriptions in all. She began to list them in her head, imagining the consequences of each missed dose—in some cases, mild, but one never knew. A chemical imbalance. Greater likelihood of dizziness, possibility of falling. A seizure.

  She called out again, “Sayoko-san!”

  The bedroom door opened. Angelica held her breath. She saw the front edge of one wheel first, and then a wrinkled white hand, pushing it.

  Angelica called out with relief, “Sayoko-san!”

  Sayoko emerged, blanket over her lap, color in her cheeks.

  “What’s all the fuss? Lower your voices.”

  Angelica rushed toward her. She reached out to pat her soft shoulder, to feel her warmth, to get a better look at her eyes, and even to smell her breath. “Are you all right?”

  Sayoko’s breath was a little sickly-sweet. Mild dehydration at worst. Sayoko-san rarely drank enough water or tea unless someone repeatedly pestered her about it. But her color was good. Her eyes were bright. She even smelled of powder, like she’d been fixing up her face prior to Angelica’s return.

  “Of course I’m all right. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing, nothing.” Angelica hid her face in her sleeve, wiping hard. “The day. Then I got back. And then I thought . . . nothing.”

  “I was taking a nap and then I freshened myself up. Isn’t that allowed?”

  So she didn’t know.

  “Your robot,” Angelica said, getting her breath and voice under control. “Hiro.”

  Hiro was behind Angelica now, bouncing lightly on his legs with audible excitement, a metallic near-giggle.

  “He’s—he’s different now. He assembled himself, with help from Gina.”

  Sayoko sighed. “I can see, can’t I? He doesn’t look like a rice cooker just sitting on a shelf anymore. He has legs and arms and hands. How else could he make my dinner?”

  The bad smell again. Rice cooker.

  Angelica said, “I didn’t give him permission to cook anything.”

  “You didn’t know he could cook anything. He can do all sorts of things now. We’ve had a lot of fun today . . .”

  Sayoko was still talking, but Angelica had tuned her out and was already rushing toward the kitchen, the source of the starchy carbon smell.

  She stopped in the doorway. There was no straight path to the counter. Groceries covered the floor. Cans, sacks of rice, a cabbage, long thin green beans, cucumbers. A haphazard grocery maze. On the countertop, too: mixing bowls and metal spoons, soy sauce and vinegar. A thawed piece of fish hung over the edge of the sink.

  She made her way carefully, nudged a large radish aside with her toe and flung open the lid of the rice cooker. It was only dry and crusty, not actually burnt. Any decent rice cooker would’ve turned itself off sooner. This one was old—a veritable antique that Sayoko refused to part with. The irony of which galled Angelica. Sayoko wouldn’t buy a new wheelchair, couldn’t tolerate her wrist monitor, and didn’t trust a modern rice cooker—yet she’d let a robot take over her life. Their life.

  Angelica ripped the cord out of the wall and started shouting. First in Cebuano with a few words of Tagalog and English mixed in. Then, after a moment, in Japanese.

  “This is a disaster! You stupid, awful thing!”

  Hiro appeared in the doorway first, arms held slightly away from his body, fingers flexing nervously. Gina, only as tall as his waist, was behind him, pivoting right and left on her wheels, trying to get past him to receive instructions from Angelica. Gina said, “Would you like me to clean? Should I remove the objects from the floor?”

  But Hiro’s anguish was louder. He made a doglike whine, falling off at the end, then resuming higher, dangerously loud, until her eardrums felt ready to burst.

  Angelica knew she was upsetting him, but she couldn’t stop. “This is wrong. You are bad. Very, very bad, Hiro.” She persisted despite his whine, muted for
the moment. “You could have burned down the whole building.” It wasn’t true. There was only the odd smell and the scrubbing job ahead. “And we never put food on the floor. Never. It’s filthy.”

  “It isn’t filthy,” Hiro objected. “Gina sanitized the floor. The counters have a higher bacteria count. We were doing an inventory. We were reorganizing.”

  “The floor isn’t clean.”

  “It is,” he said. “It was.” His voice was becoming distressed again, the pitch rising, making her ears throb. “Your shoes. Take off your shoes at the door, Anji-san.”

  “You’re not to cook—”

  “We don’t wear shoes in the house, Anji-san.”

  “You don’t wear shoes at all!” she shouted. “You’re not a person. You’re not a human being. You’re not a nurse or a cook. You’re a broken appliance. And you’re a danger to Sayoko-san. You shouldn’t exist.”

  His sounds immediately ceased. His fingers stopped flexing. He had just eased back in a little bounce, knees bent, and he remained that way, in a partial crouch, eyes dimmed, as if she’d stumbled upon the magic phrase that took his animating spirit away. She watched. After a moment, his eyes brightened again—brighter than she’d ever seen. Cold fire. Soundlessly, he straightened up, turned. Gina scooted away to let him pass. He walked away, vanishing from Angelica’s sight.

  Sitting in her room moments later, facing Angelica, door closed for privacy, Sayoko was surprisingly calm. Regal, even.

  “I’ve sent my son a message to come home.”

  Itou-san was due home two days before the birthday party. Angelica was so used to handling everything for Sayoko, so used to assuming she had no sense of the day or date or time, and where her son was at any given hour—or how to contact him, for that matter, though they had shown her how to use her wrist monitor to record and send short audios. She had resisted nearly all independent communication in the past.

  Sayoko clarified, “I know he was coming home soon, but he was willing to book an earlier flight. It’s for the best.”

  Angelica took a deep breath, preparing to thank her. She was sitting on the edge of the low futon, perched there, still ready to jump up at a moment’s notice if she heard the robots getting into trouble, outside the door.

  Sayoko said, “And I asked Gina to arrange for the rental agency to pick her up in the morning.”

  “I thought I’d have to take her and her box all the way back to Chiba—”

  “No. For a small fee, they have a pickup option. It’s no trouble.”

  Now Angelica felt like the client, the child. Pick-up service. Of course. She was disorganized and inefficient. She had lost her cool. She had overreacted. She suggested timidly, “If only someone would come pick up Hiro . . .”

  But Sayoko did not reply to that.

  Sayoko shifted in her wheelchair, as if she were going to reach out and touch Angelica on the arm but had second thoughts.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve said anything unkind to you, these last few days.”

  “Thank you.” Angelica bowed her head.

  “It’s nothing.”

  Clearly, it was Angelica’s turn now. She was not one to mix personal and professional, but she had always wanted to say this one thing. “I don’t have my grandmother anymore. She was, like you, very strong in her later years. She spoke her mind.”

  Was that so very hard?

  Sayoko acted as if she hadn’t heard. She said, “I think it might be better if . . . Don’t misunderstand. I wouldn’t want—”

  What had started out sounding warm and genuine to Angelica’s ears was on the verge of becoming—what was it—a sort of breakup? A gentle and ambiguous firing?

  Or possibly not yet.

  Sayoko folded her hands on her lap. “I’m sure you feel bad about saying those unfair things to Hiro.”

  Angelica struggled to contain her emotions. If Sayoko hadn’t said it, perhaps she would’ve come to those feelings herself—shame was already roiling in her stomach—but hearing it expressed in clear terms, in testing, conditional terms, brought out her contrary nature. She was not sorry. He was a menace. And he was only a machine. Hiro’s feelings were not her concern. Sayoko’s safety was.

  But Angelica’s indignation was fragile. The proof of her poor choices was still evident, just on the other side of that door.

  “You’re not blameless, you know,” Sayoko said.

  For a moment Angelica thought Sayoko would mention the missed round of medication, but she didn’t. Sayoko was almost certainly unaware. She was thinking only of Angelica’s absence.

  “You chose to leave me here, with him.”

  “And with Gina,” Angelica added.

  “Yes, you entrusted my care to a talking vacuum cleaner.” Sayoko’s stern expression softened at last. She offered a complicit smile. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  They agreed to have a peacemaking chat with Hiro. But when Angelica pushed Sayoko’s wheelchair into the living room, it was empty. Angelica checked the bedrooms, bathrooms and closets, half-expecting to see Hiro crouched in a corner, sulking. In the kitchen, Gina was busy putting food away. She could not tell them where Hiro had gone.

  Without any protest about the cold or the danger of crossing streets, Sayoko let Angelica push her down busy Asakusa-dori, past the funerary supply shops that Angelica rarely noticed, beyond their window displays of cremation urns and dignified, tasseled funeral stationery. The sun had set and the shops were all closed, but Sayoko insisted on peering into each display window, just in case Hiro had wandered inside, curious, and had gotten caught up talking with a shopkeeper.

  “Why would he be curious?” Angelica asked.

  “We talked about death. It perplexed him. He wanted to know about our cremation customs. I explained how we use chopsticks to pull the bones from the ash, how we pass the bones from one set of sticks to another and place them into the urn. Or we still did when my husband passed. Maybe they pay someone to do all that now.”

  They looked inside another window featuring home altars, juzu prayer beads and condolence money envelopes.

  “He was worried about when I would die,” Sayoko mused. “I reminded him that technology is advancing so fast, we just can’t know. Who thought I would still be alive now?”

  Angelica said, “He shouldn’t worry you so much with those thoughts or get you talking about ashes and chopsticks. It’s morbid.”

  Sayoko set her hands on the top of her wheels for a moment, forcing Angelica to stop. She turned to look over her shoulder, a gesture she could manage only halfway, so that Angelica got a sideways glimpse of her saddened profile.

  “Young people rarely understand. There’s nothing wrong with morbid thoughts. Anyway, Hiro asks questions about everything. I like that. He makes me realize that I do have things to say.”

  Sayoko must have read something in Angelica’s expression. “He isn’t just flattering me, either.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “He wants to know. He needs to know. He needs me.”

  Angelica started pushing the wheelchair again. She thought Sayoko was finished, but just as they reached the heavier traffic of Showa-dori, the multi-lane highway separating their quiet neighborhood from bustling Ueno Park, Sayoko spoke again.

  “Exotic is a bad word these days. But there was a time when many people were exotic to each other, and it wasn’t always a bad thing.”

  But Sayoko stopped there. Angelica leaned over, ear closer, pushing the wheelchair slowly, waiting. Exotic?

  “I was exotic to him, but he was exotic to me, too. Is that so terrible? He wanted to study me but I was hungry for anything new, and I was trying to understand him as well.”

  “Who, Sayoko-san?”

  Sayoko refused to answer the question. She was lost in her own thoughts.

  “Hiro studies me, he is us
ing our every interaction to understand human beings, and I don’t feel used at all. I feel . . .”

  Angelica waited.

  After another moment Sayoko said, “He reminds me of my first love. Is that strange?”

  Yes, Angelica wanted to say, but she held it in, suppressing both her words and her sense of dread. Older patients talked about their first sweethearts all the time, and most nurses enjoyed the stories, which were nearly always safe territory. But this was different. It was one thing to talk about a past love, and another to imagine a machine as resembling that person. It was immensely disturbing—all of it. Maybe Sayoko’s mind wasn’t sound after all.

  “I’ve talked about it with Hiro,” Sayoko said. “I was a dry plant and Daisuke was . . . rain. Simple as that.”

  At Showa-dori, in the shadow of a busy overpass, Sayoko said, “Wait,” and then grew quiet. The blue nightfall had deepened into black, and now the oncoming cars were like living things, animal eyes advancing too quickly. Pedestrian walkways climbed up and over the streaming traffic, but there was no way for Angelica to push a wheelchair up the steps, and if there was some kind of elevator or wheelchair-accessible tunnel in that warren of roadside buildings, restaurants, and pachinko parlors, she didn’t know where it was. The street level crosswalks were crowded with commuters coming home from the train station and crowds of twenty-somethings, many of them dressed like they were still in high school, holding onto their bygone youth, in short plaid skirts or gray pants and navy blue uniform jackets. But everyone else walked quickly, with no fear of getting stuck before the light changed.

  This was the point at which Sayoko often begged off, claiming to be tired, wishing to return home. Why press on, past all that traffic? Ueno Park was a shadow of what it had been, not that it had an unblemished past—in addition to temples, it had once housed a red-light teahouse district, as even a foreign worker like Angelica knew. Now there were homeless people and lewd street performers, jugglers and women in tight leotards. There were too many bohemian visitors and too many shadowy corners. The shrines would be darkened now, the o-mikuji paper fortune slips knotted over metal wires, fluttering in the wind. The tall grass at the margins of Shinobazu Pond would rattle like swords.